Perdido 03

Sunday, December 15, 2013

How The NYPD And The NYCDOE Suffer From The Same Bloombergian Disease

It's called checklistitis - as in, the corporate managers of the NYPD and the NYCDOE, people with little to no actual experience in the jobs they're now managing other people for, demand accountability of underlings through endless checklists on which every category of data must get checked or else there is hell to pay.

Under Bratton, NYPD executives were subject to Compstat meetings, where
they were challenged, often reprimanded regarding crime statistics in
their commands and compelled to develop strategies to correct these
conditions. But ultimately, the focus was on having well-trained and
effective line-level enforcers.

A lot of that changed under Commissioner Raymond Kelly, when a harsher, more corporate management ethos took over.

Units previously run by lieutenants were now managed by an executive.
These commanders were less concerned with allowing detectives to run
their investigations than with trying to anticipate and generate answers
to the questions they expected to be asked when called on the Compstat
carpet or briefing the commissioner on high-profile cases.

And most of the new bosses had very little hands-on experience.
Detectives who spent their careers investigating serious offenses were
being told at every step to check in first with an executive who
typically never worked as a detective.

The sharp decline in detectives’ case clearance rates is strong
evidence that this management style has outlived its usefulness.

Under Kelly, the NYPD has become top-heavy, with more executives than
ever micromanaging minutiae barely worthy of a sergeant’s attention.

Now, when a situation challenges a patrol officer, he calls a sergeant, who calls the lieutenant, who notifies the captain.

Many of my former colleagues are dubious that Bratton’s proactive,
cop-friendly tactics will be met with approval by Mayor-elect Bill de
Blasio. But the incoming commissioner’s adaptability should not be
underestimated.

The challenge Bratton faces on his return, which may be more perplexing
than the out-of-control crime he faced in 1994, is how to get
detectives who have been trained to follow checklists rather than
investigative leads — and supervisors with years of seniority who have
never made a significant decision — onboard with his agenda, which
depends on intelligence and autonomy, rather than automatons.

Sounds eerily familiar to those of us in the DOE who have seen the same micromanaging of minutiae barely worth anybody's attention but under Bloomberg, God forbid that minutiae remains unchecked on the checklist, or there is hell to pay.

This is Bloomberg's top-down management style, which stems from his arrogant conviction that everybody outside of himself and his crop of cronies is an idiot who cannot be allowed to handle any decisions on their own.

A commenter at the News story wrote:

The Mayor believes that the people of New York are incapable of
making petty decisions as well. Great point and it would seem that
their like-mindedness has made them (Mayor & PC) inseparable all
these years.

The organization, to be called Bloomberg Associates, will act as an
urban SWAT team, deployed at the invitation of local governments to
solve knotty, long-term challenges, like turning a blighted waterfront
into a gleaming public space, or building subway-friendly residential
neighborhoods.

In a twist on the traditional business model of consulting, clients will not be charged.

Much
about the new group is still unknown. But as with most of Mr.
Bloomberg’s undertakings over the past decade, it will involve spending
eye-popping sums of money with no expectation of earning a profit. (The
annual budget will run in the tens of millions.)

The group
resembles a government in exile. Mr. Bloomberg has recruited at least
half a dozen top aides from his administration, including Janette
Sadik-Khan, the transportation commissioner; Katherine Oliver, the
commissioner of media and entertainment; and Kate D. Levin, the cultural
affairs commissioner.

Bloomberg Associates will be run by George
A. Fertitta, who as chief executive of the city’s tourism agency
oversaw a record increase in annual visitors to New York, to 54 million
this year. Mr. Fertitta said in an interview that the group would
eventually expand to about 20 to 25 employees, most of them drawn from
the mayor’s office, who will work closely with Mr. Bloomberg’s sprawling
charitable foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies. (Like the foundation,
the consultancy will be housed inside a giant townhouse on the Upper
East Side, around the corner from the mayor’s home.)

OMGWhat are we doing to stop this parasite that is worming it's way into the fiber of our collective being?And DBD says that Obama is coming back to his 2008 campaign theme of inequality. Yes, the neo-liberal talk out of 2 sides of the Obamagogue's mouth.Waking up?